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Guangxu 33 years,31-year-old Xiao DezhangSince entering the palace as a eunuch in the 16th year, he returned to his hometown of Tianjin in style, he invited the whole village to eat meat-filled buns, for the father and villagers who were deeply impoverished at that time, Xiao Dezhang is simply a living Bodhisattva in the world.
Due to the successful example of Xiao Dezhang, at the end of 1911Sun Huaibao, a poor man in TianjinFinally decided to take his own son,Ten-year-old Sun Yaoting was clean, for him to fight for the opportunity to become a eunuch in the palace.
Later, Sun Yaoting recalled the unbearable past of being cleaned, he said that because the family conditions were too difficult, he couldn't get a dozen taels of silver to ask a professional to get it, his father used his own shaving knife, and the two uncles were responsible for holding down his hands and feetThe outbreak of the Wuchang Uprising, the social situation has undergone a tremendous transformation. One day his father opened the door and criedLack of great virtue, the emperor **!
Due to the Ming Dynasty periodEunuch dictatorshipThe situation is more serious, so the people also see a kind of example, so many families rush to castrate their sons and send them to the palace in order to glorify the results of the lintel. During the Wanli period, tens of thousands of people around Beijing City alone planned to enter the palace after the palace, but because there were too many people who wanted to enter the palace as eunuchs at that time, they could only beConstantly pull the relationship and go through the back door.
In the 48th year of Qianlong, Wang Erge was poor in his family, and he cleaned his 11-year-old son privately, and the father and son were imprisoned after the incident. The son was the victim, but he was sentenced to death and imprisoned in the county jail for a year, and the case was finally sent to the hands of the Qianlong Emperor, who personally interrogated him and decided to release Wang Erge's father and son. And considering that the situation is more complicated, so Emperor QianlongThe law that beheading was punishable by the palace was abolishedSince then,Poverty from the palaceCleanseIt became legal during the Qing Dynasty.
Different from the eunuch system of the Ming Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty has strictly controlled the situation of eunuchs interfering in politics since the founding of the country, and the Shunzhi Emperor Fulin also personally issued an iron decree strictly prohibiting eunuchs from interfering in politics, under the serious intervention of the Qing Dynasty emperor, although there were many eunuchs in the Qing Dynasty who were favored by the emperor, there was no situation like Wang Zhen, Liu Jin and Wei Zhongxian of the Ming Dynasty interfering in politics.
In the late Qing Dynasty, there were more than 50 codes of conduct for eunuchs in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and once the eunuchs committed a crime, they would be assigned and executed immediately, so the emperors of the Qing Dynasty were not as popular as the emperors of the Ming Dynasty, which is why the eunuchs of the Qing Dynasty have always been inVacancy status, such as the phenomenon of tens of thousands of people competing for one or two thousand eunuch places in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, almost did not appear.
Qianlong yearroomThe quota of eunuchs was set at 3,300 people, but in the 58th year of Qianlong, the number of eunuchs in the Qing court was only 2,605There are more than 600 vacanciesIn the 22nd year of Daoguang, the Qing court stipulated that the number of eunuchs was2500 people,But the actual number of eunuchs was only 1,693VacanciesThe number of people is more than 700.
Because the status of eunuchs in the Qing Dynasty was very low, and their lives were difficult, in the 18th year of Jiaqing, the eunuchs in the Forbidden City even cooperated with the opening of the palace gate as an internal response, causing more than 200 Tianli followers to directly attack Beijing and try to assassinate the Jiaqing Emperor.
The eunuch who served beside the Empress Dowager CixiXin XiumingIt was once said that when the Empress Dowager Cixi was eating, once she said that the dishes were salty, light, or the color was wrong, the head of the imperial dining room, the eunuchs, the eunuchs, the service cooks and other large and small people would all be beaten.
The Empress Dowager Cixi has always been fond of using torture to maintain public orderTherefore, there are many eunuchs who serve beside Cixi. Even Xiao Dezhang, the big celebrity next to the Empress Dowager Cixi, recalled afterwards that the fact that the eunuch *** beat this point. He saidMost of the bamboos used for execution in the palace were soaked in blood for many years.
When Xiao Dezhang just entered the palace, he secretly recorded the number of times he was slapped by the master and hit the bamboo pole, and there were more than 2,000 times a year, and he had to be beaten almost every day. The eunuchs in the palace are also divided into 369 and so on, taking the chief eunuch as an example, the monthly meal money is 100 taels, each meal has 40 dishes and two soups, and the lowest eunuch only has two taels of silver per month, and has to eat a large pot of rice, and some chief eunuchs and chief eunuchs have a single kitchen.
Because eunuchs have been in a monotonous, boring and stressful living environment for a long time, they have to find another kind of spiritual compensation, so they are commonto the cuisine, gamblingAs well as raising small animals, a special psychological dependence is formed
During the Qing Dynasty, the bored eunuchs often passed the time in order to pass the timeGather people to gamble in the palace, Even in the early days, the chief manager of the Forbidden City's Heart Cultivation Hall did not repay the money because of the crowd gambling, and he had already had a quarrel with the second manager, so that they exposed each other to open a gambling game, and this matter was finally dismissed by both and proposed the Forbidden City.
Since the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the phenomenon of living with palace maids has become popular among the eunuch group. In the Qing Dynasty, although the eunuchs were strictly managed, they were alsoEunuchs were allowed to lead a family lifeTarget. Take Empress Dowager Cixi's eunuch Xiao Dezhang in Chongqing as an example, he has lived all his lifeMarried four wives
Xiao Dezhang later recalled that it was strange to say, what did the eunuch do when he married his wife, and he couldn't live the life of a husband and wife, but the fun of the family still had to be enjoyed. In the old society, as long as there was money, anything inhumane could be done, the eunuch who made a fortune, and the young and beautiful wife, not only Xiao Dezhang alone, sometimes they also relied on the young and beautiful wife to contact the big officials for themselves, and win over their peers to engage in power, for exampleThe head of the imperial dining room, the eunuch Gu Yuxiu,Just because there is no outstanding place, but with his young and beautiful wife running for him, he climbed to the position of the head of the imperial dining room.
The great eunuch Li Lianying once also married a wife, he married his wife Miao, and later married Ma Furong, a famous prostitute in the capital.
After Xiao Dezhang moved out of Beijing in 1912, he served as his legal adviser for a long timeXia QinxiRecall that in addition to hiring all kinds of servants, the whole family except his mother, everyone has to call him master, and his family rules are very many, and most of them retain the traditions of the palace, such asMen are not allowed to enter the inner houseHis wife's name is Zhang Xiaoxian, she is a prostitute and is very favored, and rarely goes out to meet others except for the New Year's Festival.
According to other eunuchs, Xiao Dezhang had a concubine who was secretly friendly with others, and after Xiao Dezhang found out, he actually ordered him to be killed and his body was mutilated.
With the end of the Qing Dynasty, the eunuch system also came to an end. In 1912, the last emperor Pu Yi announced his abdication,** allowing Pu Yi to live in the Forbidden City, so the eunuchs, who were derivatives of imperial power, were also given a chance to survive.
In 1922, 1,137 eunuchs remained in the Forbidden City, but due to the weakening of the Qing Dynasty, coupled with the promise of 4 million taels of silver dollars per year, it is often difficult to issue a pension, so the eunuchs in the Forbidden City in order to solve economic difficulties, often steal the jewels in the palace to the outside for resale, and then Emperor Puyi really couldn't stand it, so he ordered to catch the thief.
But after the eunuchs of the palace heard that the emperor was going to order the thief to be arrested, in order to escape the crime, they even set a fire directly. Here it isOn June 26, 1923, a fire broke out in the Forbidden Cityreason, at the timeMore than 400 palaces were destroyed in one fell swoopMore than 20 days after the fire, Pu Yi ordered all but 175 eunuchs to be retained.
But the last eunuch, Sun Yaoting, was left by Pu Yi's sideIn 1924, Feng Yuxiang launched a mutiny, and Sun Yaoting had no choice but to leave the palaceIn 1932, after the establishment of the puppet Manchukuo supported by Pu Yi in Japan, Sun Yaoting came to Changchun with Pu Yi. Later, Sun Yaoting had liver cirrhosis and needed to be isolated, and Pu Yi specially distributed it to him500 yuan as a ** feeAt that time, 500 yuan was very valuable, and I could buy 110 bags of American flour at once.
Write at the end:
In 1985, the biography of the last emperor Sun Yaoting was adapted into a movie, and in 1996,Sun YaotingHe died at the age of 94 at Guanghua Temple in BeijingSince then, the last eunuch in China has disappeared into the dust of history, and the eunuch system that has existed in China for thousands of years has also disappeared.